Chloë Grace Moretz, Gayle Forman and Jamie Blackley on “If I Stay”

When Chloë Grace Moretz
exploded onto the screen in “Kick-Ass,” spouting four-letter words and slicing
foes while sporting killer comic timing, audiences were galvanized. It would’ve
been so easy for Moretz to spend the remainder of her career merely inhabiting
clones of her breakout role as Hit Girl. Instead, Moretz has tackled one
daunting character after another, playing everything from an ancient vampire in
“Let Me In” and a Parisian lass in “Hugo” to a tormented telekinetic teen in “Carrie”
and a guilt-ridden survivor of a school shooting in Steven Soderbergh’s
just-wrapped play, “The Library.” Her latest role is Mia, the heroine of “If I
Stay,” director R.J. Cutler’s adaptation of Gayle Forman’s bestselling young
adult novel. With her body in a coma and the fate of her family uncertain in
the aftermath of a horrific car accident, Mia is faced with a decision: either face
life or embrace death. Much of the film unfolds in flashback, charting Mia’s evolution
as a violin prodigy and illustrating how her interest in Juilliard conflicts
with her troubled romance with Adam (Jamie Blackley), a rocker smitten by her
passion.

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RogerEbert.com spoke with
Moretz, Forman and Blackley about emotional fight scenes, the pitfalls of YA
adaptations and the general awesomeness of Stacy Keach.

After embodying pint-sized adults in films like “Kick-Ass” and “Let
Me In,” you’ve recently been playing characters that are closer to your age,
which is a trickier challenge than it seems. The vulnerability of Mia is a
sharp contrast to the self-assurance of Hit Girl.

Chloë Grace Moretz (CM): Yeah,
exactly. Conveying that vulnerability as an actor is almost harder than portraying
sadness. The hardest thing you can do is show happiness and love and elation.
Those are qualities that are hard to manufacture. My role as Abby in “Let Me
In” was incredibly hard, but I find it more challenging as an actress, weirdly
enough, to be a normal kind of kid who’s falling in love. You can feel loss
from the time you’re five years old and your pet hamster dies. People feel loss
all the time, but it’s harder to feel true elation, especially when you’re a
teenager.

At last night’s Q&A, Gayle was reminiscing about getting
emotional onset while watching the actors portray scenes from her book. What
was your collaboration like with the filmmakers?

Gayle Forman (GF): I was
lucky, first of all, that the project landed with Alison Greenspan. This was a
producer who really found something that touched her in the pages and that was
a guiding principle all along. It just seems to be a special project where
everybody who has come in contact with it has felt very protective over the
story. That’s not to say we’re insisting that the book must be pasted onto the
screen, because that doesn’t work. That doesn’t make a good film. The idea is
to translate these characters and the emotional experience of the book onto the
screen. Chloë really connected with Mia, and has always wanted to do the film.
R.J. felt the same way, so I knew that the film was going to be its own piece
of art. It started with the script [by Shauna Cross], which just got better and
better. Then we started casting. We had Chloë attached
from the get-go, but when they started to bring in Mireille [Enos] or Liana
[Liberato], I kept finding myself saying, “Oh wow, she’s perfect!” And when [Jamie]
came in, I thought, “How the hell did they find him?” [laughs] When I saw
scenes being shot onset, my ongoing thought was, “They’re really getting this.”
Oftentimes when you see adaptations of books you like, you’re let down. As an
author, you assume that they are going to suck. A little bit of hope is dangerous.
But I’ve seen the final film a couple times now and I really do think that it
works in all the right ways.

I particularly
liked how the male love interest isn’t as idealized as those often found in YA
adaptations. How did you approach the character?

Jamie Blackley (JB): We’ve all
experienced young love, but I thought that would probably be the hardest thing
to make feel real onscreen. Yet once we started shooting, it all came pretty
easily. As for the music side of it, I got a chance before we started shooting
to work all of that out. I just did music rehearsals for the first two or three
weeks. I’d go back to the hotel and learn songs for the next day. It felt like
I was in a band, and I would get excited to go play with the other musicians.
It all felt pretty real.

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The
strain on Mia and Adam’s relationship rang especially true as they find
themselves pulled in different directions. You [Chloë] have recently been quoted saying that you don’t
want relationships to be your primary focus in life. Is this one way in which
you could connect with Mia?

CM: Definitely. I could connect to Mia in
a ton of ways, and the main way was the fact that we both have this passion. It
isn’t a boy, it’s the cello for Mia and for me, it’s acting. We both found our
first love at five years old, and it’s always been our number one thing. No
matter what, you wouldn’t give that up for anything. That’s what happens in the
fight scene between Mia and Adam. They’re both having this big clash and the
minute she starts to pursue her dreams, meaning that she might have to leave
Portland, he can’t really handle that, which is what happens at that age. You
haven’t gone to college, you haven’t felt your life out, you haven’t become a
full person. You’re a kid. You get in over your head and you feel these
emotions that are real and raw but your psyche can’t handle it because you’re
not formed enough to handle it. I think it was realistically portrayed through
Gayle’s writing and the script and how we performed it. They very much love one
another but they both have such a passion and drive for what they want to
succeed in that it kind of derails their relationship a little bit.

GF: It brings them together and it pulls
them apart. I love that fight scene so much. A good fight scene is really a
good love scene. It’s not one of those books where the characters go, “Yes, we
will go to college together and stay together no matter what.” Somebody is
sacrificing something. I love how the film shows both of their musical stars
rising as they’re falling in love. Even if this accident never happens, you
know trouble is coming.

Your
books have often taken the form of dual narratives, where the same relationship
is explored from each lover’s perspective. Could you see this working
cinematically, as in “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby”?

GF: Not for “If I Stay” and “Where She
Went.” I have another pair of books [“Just One Day” and “Just One Year”] that
are structured as transparencies where each book gives you a completely
different picture of the same relationship. We want those to be done as one
film when that happens. In the case of “Where She Went,” I never intended to
write a sequel. I thought I was done and that “If I Stay” would be a standalone
book. I was actually writing an entirely different book that I had under
contract. I would write that book during the day and then at four o’clock in
the morning, these characters would be banging on the door in my head asking,
“Where the hell have you left us?” Even though the book ends on a hopeful note,
the characters have a hellish period ahead of them. I didn’t even want to think
about that so I chickened out and skipped ahead three years and that’s where
the story started to materialize and it became Adam’s story. It’s not really a
retelling of “If I Stay.” It’s kind of a chronological story of what happens
afterward. It’s about the consequences of the promise Adam makes to Mia and the
consequences of Mia’s decision to “stay” and what it does to their relationship.

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Another
strength of this film is its excellent ensemble. The monologue delivered to Mia
by Stacy Keach as her grandfather is simply shattering.

JB: Oh my god, he was amazing!

GF: When his voice starts cracking, it
just kills me.

What
was it like performing that scene with him?

CM: I was not prepared for it at all. I
was not prepared for how sad it would be to see Stacy cry. He’s one of the
nicest guys ever and I connected with him when we were filming the Juilliard
stuff. I thought, “He’s such a sweet guy, he’s so kind.” When we did this
scene, we shot both of our coverage at the same time, which was great, because
we didn’t do that a lot, but those days got really tight on time. There were so
many scenes where people had to say goodbye and that was when we had to really
hone in on our work. Since we shot the double coverage, what you see in the
film is literally my reaction to Stacy Keach’s performance. It was so sad. He
did such an amazing job.

Another
person worth mentioning is Liana Liberato, who gives a wonderful performance as
your friend Kim, and absolutely destroyed me in David Schwimmer’s 2011 film, “Trust.”

CM: I love that film. Liana and I became
really good friends. We would all hang out offset and had a good time. We were
lucky because we are all pretty normal people.

JB: There wasn’t anyone there that would
make you go, “Ugh, I don’t want to hang out with them.” [laughs]

CM: No one asked us to perform the “Cups”
song [from “Pitch Perfect”] in one of our scenes together. We just got it off
of YouTube and learned it that day. We were all just normal kids.

One
film I am very excited to see is Olivier Assayas’ “Clouds of Sils Maria,” where
you act opposite Juliette Binoche. What was it like attending the film’s
premiere at Cannes?

CM: It was shocking.
You’re walking up those steps with a thousand other people and there are two
hundred photographers taking pictures of you. I was holding Juliette Binoche’s
hand and I was so confused and I was jet lagged and I felt like I might be on
some other planet. [laughs] It was the most confusing experience of my life.
But it was amazing. We got an eight-minute standing ovation after the movie. I
could never do Cannes again and be happy with the experience I had. It was
really special.

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